Basic Policy about Attending Workshops:

Only presenters and their colleagues can attend Ubicomp 2005 workshops. If you are not a presenter and want to attend one of the thirteen workshops, please send an e-mail to the chair of the workshop you want to attend and obtain your workshop registration ID. For instance, if you want to attend W13, please send an e-mail to Prof. Shiro Sakata.

Workshops provide an opportunity to discuss and explore emerging areas of ubiquitous computing research with a group of like-minded researchers and practitioners. Workshops may focus on any aspect of ubiquitous computing, established concerns or new ideas. The goal of the workshop is to share understandings and experiences, to foster research communities, to learn from each other and to envision future directions.

Workshops will be held on Sunday 11 September, the day before the main conference. Opportunities will be available for the outcome of workshops to be reported to the rest of the UbiComp 2005 conference through posters.

Please note that, prospective workshop attendees require an invitation from the workshop organisers based on acceptance of submitted position papers or explicit request. Upon acceptance, attendees will need to explicitly register for the workshop, which will include a separate workshop fee, in addition to registering for the main conference.

Workshop titles and organizers are listed below. General questions about the workshops can be addressed to the Workshop Co-Chairs (Yoshito Tobe and Khai N. Truong, workshops-2005@ubicomp.org); specific questions about any individual workshop should be directed to the organizer(s) of the workshop.

Next-generation conference rooms are often designed to anticipate the onslaught of new rich media presentation and ideation systems. Throughout the past couple of decades, many researchers have attempted to reinvent the conference room, aiming at shared online or visual/virtual spaces, smart tables or walls, media support and tele-conferencing systems of varying complexity. Current research in high-end room systems often features a multiplicity of thin, bright display screens (both large and small), along with interactive whiteboards, robotic cameras, and smart remote conferencing systems. Added into the mix one can find a variety of meeting capture and metadata management systems, automatic or not, focused on capturing different aspects of meetings in different media: to the Web, to one's PDA or phone, or to a company database. Smart spaces and interactive furniture design projects have shown systems embedded in tables, podiums, walls, chairs and even floors and lighting.

Exploiting the capabilities of all these technologies in one room, however, is a daunting task. For example, faced with three or more display screens, all but a few presenters are likely to opt for simply replicating the same image on all of them. Even more daunting is the design challenge: how to choose which capabilities are vital to particular tasks, or for a particular room, or are well suited to a particular culture.

At the same time, creating engaging meeting experiences can increase both knowledge transfer and knowledge retention. The incorporation of media-rich engagement strategies in meetings creates a need to provide meeting participants with appropriate tools for managing these media.

In this workshop we'll explore how the design of next-generation conference rooms can be informed by the most recent research in rich media, context-aware mobile systems, ubiquitous displays, and interactive physical environments. How should conference room systems reflect the rapidly changing expectations around personal devices and smart spaces? What kinds of systems are needed to support meetings in technologically complex environments? How can design of conference room spaces and technologies account for differing social and cultural practices around meetings? What requirements are imposed by security and privacy issues in public spaces?

Conference room research has been and remains a focal point for some of the most interesting and applied work in ubiquitous computing. We see a rich opportunity to draw together researchers from areas such as rich media, social computing, interactive furniture/smart environments, remote conferencing and mobile devices for a lively exchange of ideas on applied ubicomp in the conference room.

Topics:

Social requirements for formal and informal meetings

Ubiquitous displays: multiple screens, multiple media

Interactive furnishings and smart environments

Rich media for mobile devices in conference settings

Remote and local multimedia conference support systems

Designing across cultural and linguistic barriers

Learning from prototypes and experimental systems

Content preparation and presentation

Physical space design and physical form for smart objects

Context-aware systems for conferencing

Meeting capture and access

Media transmission and storage

Security, data handling, and privacy

Spontaneous integration of public/private data & devices

Appropriate design and evaluation techniques

W2. Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing: New Social Practices and Implications for Technology

The portable digital cameras enable prolific photo capturing in a variety of settings and inspire digital photo sharing via an extensive repertoire of mechanisms and modalities, including exchange of physical prints, sharing of digital copies via email, web pages and blogs, or simply showing images on the imaging devices during face-to-face encounters. More recently, camera phones have expanded both image capture and sharing through MMS (multimedia messaging), email from phones, and transfer via IR or Bluetooth between phones. These new functions, embedded in a device that is always close at hand, has led to the emergence of pervasive image capture and sharing.

The workshop will bring together a multi-disciplinary group of researches and practitioners for a discussion around this emerging phenomena. The goal is to examine up-to-date technology developments and current social practices, and to understand implications for further research, including design and development of new devices, applications and services.

Topics:In this workshop we will address the following broad questions:

What happens when image capture and sharing becomes an integral part of everyday life?

What social practices exist today and what new practices are likely to develop?

What are the implications for technology?

What are the possible implications for social relationships and for practical activity?

One of the major technological trends is to embed sensing, communication, computation and actuation in physical artefacts leading to the creation of smart objects. Current industrial and academic research indicates that smart objects might soon became an integral part of our daily lives with applications in economically important areas such as retail, supply chain management, asset management, safety critical situations in work places and healthcare.

Smart objects will be an important building block to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world by providing information about aspects of their physical environment. While systems of smart object clearly will need to build on emerging technologies such as RFID and wireless sensor networks the envisioned ubiquity of smart objects raises important questions about the digital representation of physical artefacts, their cooperation paradigms, integration into backend infrastructures and the applications that will benefit and influence their design and development.

The main goals of this workshop are to discuss social, technical, and legal solutions to reducing, managing, or redefining privacy risks under the various constraints shaped by the context of a certain application, a specific set of users, or a particular culture. Instead of seeing privacy as an isolated abstract concept we are interested in reviewing and discussing privacy as an integral part of individual contexts of technology use, which greatly influences both concepts and systems design. We invite submissions reflecting diverse perspectives on privacy, whether based on notions of individual rights, legal contracts, economic incentives, social obligation, or interpersonal intimacy.

Topics:

Social and legal issues in ubicomp privacy

How do various technology stakeholders (designers, managers, employees, consumers, regulators, activists, citizens, etc.) conceive of privacy and its relevance to ubicomp technologies? How do conceptions change over time, as they use and become more familiar with systems?

What incentives work best for ubicomp systems? How can weaker parties (e.g., individuals) respond to organizations's desire for information? How should this shape design?

How can we conceptualize, design, and provide context-dependent privacy that dynamically changes according to a specific situation or user need? Can we gather key insights from users~R day-to-day practices to assist in the design of large-scale ubiquitous computing systems?

How is privacy enacted and conceived differently in different cultures and communities, e.g., in different countries, across professional groups, within families, between genders?

How do affordances of different application domains shape the level of privacy users expect, or the level of privacy that can be provided?

What trade-offs are necessary to balance privacy vs. efficiency, convenience, and security? Under what circumstances is privacy to be limited or expanded?

Methods for investigating and building ubicomp privacy

What are the best methods for evaluating, measuring, and understanding privacy concerns? What kinds of qualitative and quantitative approaches work well?

What can be learned from past cases? What ubicomp-relevant systems have succeeded or failed because (or despite) of their treatment of personal information and privacy risks? What systems have successfully transitioned (or unexpectedly failed to transition) from one context or culture to another?

Which research methods have been applied to the empirical and social study of ubiquitous computing systems and privacy? Can we identify best practices for laboratory and field experiments as well as potential longitudinal studies?

What kinds of design methods are most effective for understanding the privacy concerns of a given community, especially while early in the design process?

What kinds of tools are useful for prototyping and implementing privacy-sensitive systems?

What progress is needed in core technologies such as cryptography, trusted systems, AI inference and user modeling to implement better privacy-sensitive systems?

Ubiquitous games, loosely defined, are games that take place in a mixture of the real world and the virtual world of the game. These games have attracted the attention of the entertainment industry, the art and technology community, as well as academic researchers. Moreover, these games have become a phenomenon in themselves, having been played by dozens, hundreds and even thousands of players. The theme of this workshop is ubiquitous computing entertainment, playful social networking, and games. Our goals are to provide a productive forum in which international researchers, members of the entertainment industry, game players, game designers, and game publishers can discuss key issues in ubiquitous gaming, present and future uses of ubiquitous computing that create compelling, playful and socially beneficial gaming experiences, and to facilitate an exchange of ideas that will allow ubiquitous games to break out of their current ³niche² and into the mainstream.

Topics:

New ubiquitous game designs

Mixed traditional and ubiquitous game design

Studies or reports on the compelling aspects of existing ubiquitous games

This workshop will explore issues related to the design of ubiquitous computing environments that include multi-surface, multi-display, and multi-device infrastructure. The goal of the workshop is to explore the question of how system designers might best address the issue of gaps between the different technological components with respect to end users and their interactions in these spaces. In essence, should the 'design space' between the devices be removed to create seamless interactions, or should it be retained, exposed or even made explicit, for a more seamful interaction experience?

We plan to bring together a group of researchers who share the common vision of a multi- surface, multi-display, multi-device computing
environments, but who have varying perspectives on the question of seamful vs. seamless interaction in these environments in order to identify the design trade offs and benefits of each. The workshop will include brief presentations from each participant, break out group discussions, and a brainstorming session to develop usage scenarios.

In the words of Mark Weiser, ubiquitous computing technologies should “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life.” Despite the appeal of this image there currently is a noticeable divide between technical developments and their resonance with the everyday settings in which they might be deployed. As a first measure in what has to be a long-term consideration of these issues we invite participation from interdisciplinary researchers who have experience in the field. The goal of this workshop is to enable themes of generic purchase to the developers of UbiComp systems to be initially identified and articulated, and later incorporated into design and practice.

Topics:To foster collaboration we have in mind a workshop programme that brings social scientists, computer scientists, and engineers together to consider themes of broad relevance to situating ubiquitous computing in everyday life. The topics proposed are these:

Interaction Design: to raise the study of individuals’ interactions with one another, through artefacts that are situated in the environments they inhabit;

Accountability: to address the problem of accountability as heterogeneous computing applications and devices proliferate, combine and become more complex;

Awareness: to articulate the role of the ‘ecology’ in awareness and the ways in which people exploit the ecologies they inhabit to organize their interactions;

Tangibility: to drawing attention to the close coupling of object manipulation with the ecology of space, opening up new avenues for interdisciplinary consideration of the interplay between social studies and the design of ubiquitous devices;

Coordination: to consider concerns with control, privacy, and the coordination of interaction more generally, developing a range of socio-technical protocols to support interaction.

Context: to extend beyond metrics to sense-making and to provide for the meaningful character of interaction.

One of the key characteristics of ubiquitous computing is the integration of computation with the everyday physical world. UbiComp seeks to combine electronic behaviour with material artefacts of many kinds, from added functionality in the case of Wellner’s digital desk, to added experience in the case of location-based media. But a systematic account of how to design for physical-virtual interweaving is missing.

This workshop aims to provide a forum for designers, developers and users of ubiquitous systems to exchange experiences and contribute to the elucidation of research and design challenges for physical integration in ubiquitous settings. We welcome participants from a wide range of areas of expertise including distributed systems, design, engineering, Physics and HCI. The final goal of the workshop is to identify and/or clarify the research challenges and directions.

Topics:We welcome papers on any topic concerning the design of physical-virtual integration. This includes but is not limited to:

case studies of novel physical-virtual designs

design and modelling frameworks for physical-virtual environments and applications

new mechanisms for associating the physical and the virtual

marrying physical versus digital interaction zones and boundaries

dealing with physical uncertainty and imprecision

learning from examples of physical integration outside ubicomp

learning UbiPhysics -- how are users supposed to understand and learn physical-virtual behaviours?

Cultural and natural heritage applications have proved to be an attractive vehicle for ubicomp researchers. Several projects have developed data collection tools, museum or city visitor guides as a means of demonstrating various concepts including location and context awareness and smart building environments. Together, these represent two ends of the ‘production’ process of bringing cultural and natural heritage from the research environment to its consumers. The intermediate analytical, archival and curatorial stages are less well represented, but also provide considerable scope for ubicomp research.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the ubicomp and heritage communities to share their experience, to envision future directions beyond existing demonstrators, and to examine directions towards deployable and interoperable systems.

Topics:Position papers are invited on any aspect of the role of smart environments and ubiquitous computing in the creation, management and dissemination of cultural and natural heritage.

Physical inactivity and unhealthy eating patterns are responsible for a worldwide epidemic of preventable illnesses and deaths. This workshop addresses the role of ubiquitous computing in promoting physical activity. Discussion topics include: engineering mobile and wearable devices for physically active people, culturally dependent definitions of “fitness” and “activity,” why and how we design motivational interfaces, sensors and other technologies that monitor and assess physical activity, as well as the legal and ethical concerns raised by potentially combining persuasive computing and biometric monitoring. The workshop will result in an online annotated bibliography and recommendations for promising technologies, platforms, and design approaches.

Topics:We welcome contributions from computer scientists, designers, social scientists and others who are already working on or are interested in developing solutions to help people improve their physical fitness. We imagine that this workshop will be relevant to practitioners thinking about or working on:

The Metapolis and Urban Life workshop at UbiComp seeks to include a range of practitioners exploring urban projects for which the urban is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to walking in someone else's shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games with a global audience, position papers for the Metapolis and Urban Life workshop should transform the “new” technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, smart materials and locative media into experiences that matter. “Let us embrace the full scope of urban life with all of its emotions and experiences.”

Topics:The following sub-themes are not exhaustive but suggestive of views of the Metapolis trajectories for further discussion.

There is a growing interest in the development of personalized context-aware applications for multi-user scenarios in ubiquitous computing(ubiComp) environments without any conflicts among users, devices, services, etc. The applications need to support seamless integration and interaction for mobile users in heterogeneous environments through various emerging concepts, such as sensing, processing, context modeling and management. However, to support such conflict-free user-centric services in ubiComp environments, we first have to solve the challenges associated with personalized context modeling and group context management. These challenges include context representation, integration, reasoning, and conflict resolution in distributed heterogeneous environments.

This workshop focuses on personalized context models that provide abstractions to foster context reuse and ease of programming, and support development of scalable, robust, reliable and usable context-aware ubiComp applications. In addition, this workshop focuses on conflict-free group context management that resolves conflicts resulting from multi-user's simultaneous service requests in the same space with limited resources. The workshop also responds to the growing popularity of ontology principles and methods, and actively investigates the state-of-the-art techniques, methodologies, framework for developing killer context-aware applications in ubiComp environment.

Topics:We invite researchers from academia and industry to submit their papers. The position papers are expected to contain a clear statement about user-centric context modeling and group context management for multi-user scenarios in ubiComp environment. The authors should clearly state their contribution and identify open challenges. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

Formal or disciplined approaches to modeling personalized context

Semantics of personalized context models and expressiveness of different context modeling approaches